Alys Faiz

The journalist Alys Faiz, who has died aged 87, was one of the last surviving members of a diminishing band of internationally minded campaigners who fought for the anti-colonial cause in prewar London, and later exercised considerable influence on the human rights agenda in the newly emerging states of the Indian sub-continent.

Born in London, the daughter of a bookseller, she went to school in Leyton, Essex, and joined the Communist party as a teenager. With her sister Christobel, she became close to a group of London-based Indian intellectuals, and joined the Free India League. She worked as the unpaid secretary to Krishna Menon, the league secretary, who became a leading diplomat and politician in Jawaharlal Nehru's government after Indian independence in 1947.

In 1938, Alys went to India herself to visit Christobel, who had married a well-known educationist and writer, MD Tasser. There, she fell in with a group of radical writers and political activists, including her future husband, the Urdu poet and Lenin peace prizewinner Faiz Ahmed Faiz. They were married in 1941.

After the partition of the sub-continent, Alys adopted Pakistan as her homeland, and helped resettle the mass of refugees generated by the transfer of Hindus and Muslims across the new borders. In 1951, Faiz Ahmed Faiz was imprisoned for his alleged role in what became known as the "Rawalpindi conspiracy" to overthrow the government of Pakistan; he was, in part, the inspiration for the character of the poet Nadir Khan, in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

Alys bore this difficult period with dignity. She joined the staff of the country's leading English-language daily, the Pakistan Times, editing its women's and children's pages with flair. Her regular column, Appa Jan (or "elder sister"), inspired a generation of young women into writing and human rights activism. The touching letters she wrote to her imprisoned husband, collected into Dear Heart (1986), are a testimony to her courage.

After her husband's release in 1955, the family moved to London, but Faiz Ahmed Faiz could not endure exile and, a year later, they returned to Pakistan, settling in Karachi. In 1971, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto formed Pakistan's first democratically elected government, Alys moved to Islamabad, where her husband became cultural adviser to the new administration. From 1973, Alys herself worked with the United Nations children's fund (Unicef).

In the wake of General Zia ul-haq's military coup against Bhutto in 1977, Alys followed Faiz into exile in Beirut, from where she wrote regular dispatches to the radical weekly Pakistan paper Viewpoint; these were later collected into the anthology Over My Shoulder (1991).

After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1983 forced the Faizs to return to Pakistan, Alys wrote regularly for Viewpoint, mostly on human rights and social justice issues. She became a familiar figure on the political and cultural landscape of Lahore.

Following her husband's death in 1984, Alys continued to write for Viewpoint until it folded in 1992, after which she produced a regular column for She magazine. She also collected material for a national centre of folk heritage and handicrafts, and worked for Unicef in Islamabad, having been closely engaged with the Pakistan human rights commission since its birth in 1986.

She is survived by her daughters Saleema Hashmi, an artist and former head of the National College of Arts, and Muneeza Hashmi, a television producer and former general manager of Pakistan Television.

· Alys Faiz, journalist and human rights campaigner, born September 2 1915; died March 12 2003